Milton Glaser: Taking the Long View (On Technology)

Forty years after Milton Glaser designed the iconic I ♥ NY logo in 1977, he’s still a vibrant fixture of the city’s creative fabric at 88-years-old. In addition to his psychedelic Bob Dylan poster—and many other poster designs and logos—for which he is revered, he was also c0-founder of Push Pin Studios and New York Magazine.

In celebration of his life’s work we look to a voice that has been wise to the advances of technology, even before we entered into such dependence on the virtual world.

In 1999, Pete Hamill interviewed Milton, who was then 70-years-old, at his East 32nd Street studio for Graphis Magazine issue 324.

Read on for an excerpt from the interview, “Milton Glaser: Taking the Long View,” in which he speaks to technology and imagines the future.

Graphis: Talk about the computer and its effect on design. Has it changed design the way it’s changed everything else?

Milton Glaser: Yes, but in ways that we don’t understand. In my classes, for the first time, young people are backing away from the computer. They’re saying that they have to be more judicious about how they use it. As a conceptual instrument, it’s not very helpful. It’s not great for thinking up ideas. There isn’t anything more powerful than the eyes, the brain, and the hand to think with. When you’re thinking, you do a sketch and it’s fuzzy. You have to keep it fuzzy. So the brain looks at it and imagines another iteration, which is a little clearer. Then you do another sketch, which sort of moves it along, but it’s still fuzzy. It may take a series of indeterminate solutions, before you get there.

But the computer crystalizes things too clearly. As soon as you think on a computer, you have to be precise. It has to be this color, this shape, and things become crystalized before you can go through a dialectic, the back and forth between the brain and the sketch. Which is the way the human species has learned to solve problems. By making things too clear, too soon, you lose something essential in the development of ideas.

Graphis: It’s certainly true of writing. I almost always now start longhand, because the hands have memory. They know stuff that, unless you start, you don’t know that you know.

Glaser: That’s absolutely true. Learning is kinetic. You learn through motion. We have the idea that the site of learning is in the head, but it’s not. It’s the entire body. Also, the other thing that worries me is this separation of cause and effect. When you take a pen and make a line, there’s a direct causal relationship. But when you press a button and a color changes, there’s not. The same way when you flick a light switch there’s not. All of these instruments of technology take away from the sense of a stable universe. The idea that if you do this, that will happen. This is a fundamental idea an action produces a result. You have to understand the linkage. I pound the table, it makes a noise. You understand that. But you don’t understand clicking a button and the picture changing. I worry about that. And I think this disassociation is a characteristic of what’s happening to young people now. This sense that they don’t have a relationship to their own lives; this sense of living a virtual life.

Graphis: Milton, in looking back fifty years, you’ve seen enormous changes in the visual culture. Is there any possible way to look fifty years ahead?

Glaser: People always want predictions about what the culture’s going to be. And I couldn’t imagine anything less fruitful than trying to figure that out. But the one thing that has happened, and will probably continue to happen, is this breakdown in official, mainstream culture. There are a lot of alternative cultures within the framework of our civilization now. I don’t see any large idea emerging once again that will coalesce into a singular agreement. We’re going to see increasing diversity of one kind or another. An enormous rate of change. Stylistic change because of this tremendous impatience, driven by the inevitable economies of change. Manufacturing has to produce change. They have to produce a willingness to buy new things. And once we get the Net to be the central communication and buying mechanism for the world, we don’t know what the hell is going to happen to style. The Net will be the most powerful influence on the value systems of the economy, and that will inevitably engage things like design. It will just be swept along. The economic model becomes the model for everything else.

To read the entire interview, visit our Magazine archives. See Glaser’s Graphis Master portfolio here. Look forward to another more recent interview with Milton Glaser.